For Women in the Workplace, an ‘Upgrade Problem’

MUNICH — In a country where women find it particularly challenging to combine career and family life, Veronika Bethke enjoys something of a nirvana.

Ms. Bethke, 36, the mother of 3-year-old twin boys, conducts management training at Siemens, the German engineering giant. Since returning from an 11-month parental leave in 2008, she has worked largely part time and, when needed, from home. Her children are at a child-care center sponsored by Siemens just steps from her door.

Compared with the United States, Germany, and much of Europe, are late to the party of corporate gender diversity. But Ms. Bethke’s employer — a multinational company employing 405,000 people in 190 countries to make everything from high-speed trains to medical equipment — is one of the big European corporations that made waves in just the past two or three years trying to attract, retain and promote talented women.

In 2008, Siemens was the first company on the DAX 30 index of blue-chip German companies to appoint a woman — Barbara Kux — to its executive board. A second woman, Brigitte Ederer, was named to the board last summer, as head of corporate human resources, raising the share of women in the Siemens executive suite to 25 percent. That is nearly triple the average of 8.5 percent across German companies and double the European Union average of around 12 percent. (In the United States, roughly 40 percent of all private-sector managers are women, according to the Government Accounting Office.)

Yet her position as coach to hundreds of managers — from first-time leaders to C-level executives — affords a clear view of a bigger problem facing not only Siemens, in the very male-dominated field of engineering, but also most companies worldwide.

Despite efforts to recruit ever more women into management, the number of female leaders dwindles dramatically the closer one gets to the top.

It is a conundrum that prompts soul-searching at any gathering of professional women in the industrialized world, most of whom still struggle to chart paths to the summit of business when the signposts are often hidden — or in a language that few women speak.

With noses firmly against the glass ceiling, they are heartened by a growing recognition — born largely of demographic and economic necessity — that companies need female talent to remain competitive. In their impatience for change, these women often forget that their rise to becoming half or more of the work force in many places took place recently — in the past 50 to 60 years.

In effect, men have set the rules for so long that women still feel uneasy — and traditions are hard to change.

“European companies are waking up — but most are just starting these efforts,” said Herminia Ibarra, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior who specializes in gender issues at Insead, the European Institute of Business Administration, near Paris. “They are realizing that it’s really about changing the culture — and not just to one that is friendly to women, but to one that women would want to be a part of.”

That involves a lot more than company day care centers or more flexible hours. Family friendliness is common, Ms. Ibarra noted, “but that is not what’s going to get you women at senior levels.”

As companies struggle to put women at the top and to keep them there, political pressure in Europe is rising. Norway, France, the Netherlands and Spain have all passed laws setting minimum quotas for women on supervisory boards of publicly listed companies; other countries are considering such legislation.

Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, has hinted at mandating a 30 percent board quota for women across the Union by 2015 if companies fail to get there on their own.

To many, quotas are anathema — but most voluntary efforts are also seen as flailing. Take a series of after-work cocktail gatherings for Deutsche Bank staff in London. “People would come. They were almost all women,” said Eileen Taylor, global diversity manager of the bank. “But there would be minimal senior management involvement beyond someone coming to introduce the session and then run out the door.”

Heavy reliance on female schmooze-fests can be counterproductive.

“The cruel irony is that very well-meaning people spend a lot of time and energy trying to create this nurturing environment, only to obtain modest results,” said Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, chief executive of 20-First, a management consultancy based in Paris that focuses on gender issues.

Siemens has grabbed headlines with its high-profile appointments of women, but progress toward overall gender balance has been slower. Across Siemens, women hold just under 14 percent of management positions, up from around 9 percent in 2002. Of the division managers who report directly to the executive committee, only 7 percent are women.

Workplace analysts call this phenomenon the “leaking pipeline,” and its effects have proved stubbornly consistent across industries and national cultures, despite ever-growing numbers of women earning university degrees and aspiring to careers.

Photo

Veronika Bethke drops off her 3-year-old twin boys at the Siemens day care center, just across the road from her offices. Ms. Bethke, 36, conducts management training at the German engineering giant.Credit
Gordon Welters for the International Herald Tribune

“I don’t really think there’s an intake problem anymore,” said Laura A. Liswood, a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs and secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders, which groups together former female heads of state and government. She noted that 50 percent to 60 percent of university graduates in the developed world are women. “It’s an upgrade problem,” she said.

Ms. Taylor noted “these assumptions that the reason the pipeline is leaking is because the women are going off to have babies.” But an analysis her bank conducted last year found that no more than 5 percent of its women were on maternity leave at any given time.

A global study of 4,500 business-school graduates conducted in 2008 by Catalyst, a U.S.-based organization for women in the workplace, showed that women lagged markedly behind men in advancement and compensation from their very first professional jobs. The differences held even in comparing men and women of equal levels of work experience and professional aspiration and in discounting for whether or not they had children.

“We all had this mystical notion that if you put all of these women into the pipeline, it would fill up on its own,” Ms. Liswood said.

Ms. Bethke sees the widening gender gap up the corporate ladder in her management training courses. Of the 24 participants in each class — who must all be nominated by their bosses — the vast majority are men. Women may make up 20 percent of groups for junior leaders, the company said, but in those for top executives, the percentages are in the low single digits.

Deutsche Telekom, which has around 250,000 employees in more than 50 countries, announced ambitious voluntary quotas last spring, the first big German company to do so. The plan is to raise the ratio of female managers to 30 percent by 2015, from about 13 percent now.

Meanwhile, Mechthilde Maier, Deutsche Telekom’s head of diversity, noted, “the quota has even become part of our contracts with head-hunters.” Executive search companies have been asked to make sure that 30 percent of candidates on shortlists for management jobs are women.

Many companies have shied away from numeric gender targets, fearing to stigmatize women as “quota hires” or to alienate talented men. But Ms. Maier disagreed. “The quota is not the goal,” she said. “It is an instrument for change.”

A survey of corporate gender gaps published last year by the World Economic Forum found that, among 600 large companies, managers most often cited a “masculine or patriarchal corporate culture” and “lack of role models” as among the biggest obstacles for would-be female leaders.

Dismantling such barriers requires employers — and particularly senior leaders, who are mostly still men — to take a hard look at gender initiatives and whether they translate into more promotions for women.

“There are a lot of companies out there doing programs that are focused around ‘fixing’ the women by setting up networks and sending them to leadership and assertiveness training,” Ms. Taylor said. She said Deutsche Bank had canceled a lot of one-off programs “because we just weren’t seeing the numbers” of female leaders rise.

With support from Deutsche Bank’s chief, Josef Ackermann, she recently began directly involving top managers in the grooming of talented women. Since September 2009, the bank has paired 30 women with mentors from its executive committee — all 12 of them men.

“In companies like ours, there are not a lot of women at senior levels,” Ms. Taylor conceded. But just 18 months into the mentoring program, she said, one-third of the women are already in “new or broader roles.”

Having a high-ranking mentor seems to bring significant payoffs — for men and women. A study performed by Catalyst in 2010 with the same 4,500 business school graduates it studied in 2008 found that both men and women who had mentors at the top of their organizations got promoted at comparable rates — and faster than those who had no active mentoring relationship.

There was a stark difference, however, in access to top brass: Nearly two-thirds of the men surveyed said they had a mentor at the C.E.O. or executive-committee level, compared with 52 percent of the women. This was the case even for men and women of the same organizational rank.

Ilene H. Lang, chief executive of Catalyst, makes a clear distinction between the mentor who is more of a sounding board and counselor and one who is what she calls a “sponsor” — someone with clout to help a protégée move up. “A sponsor is someone who is sitting at the table where the decisions are being made who says: ‘She’s the one,”’ Ms. Lang said.

Simone Siebeke, a vice president at the cosmetics division of Henkel, a global consumer products group based in Düsseldorf, benefited from exposure early in her career.

Henkel has no formal mentoring program for women. But after about five years in the company’s purchasing division, Ms. Siebeke’s boss recommended her to run the office of Henkel’s executive committee. The role gave her daily contact with the C.E.O. and others in senior management, and a seat at every top-level meeting. Two and a half years later, she said, she was approached to become the head of human resources.

“This would not have happened if they had not known me,” she said.

More companies, including Unilever, the consumer products group that has headquarters in Rotterdam and London, and I.B.M., are taking steps to get talented women high-level exposure. Crucial, however, in the view of a growing number of experts, is buy-in from the top boss, male or female.

“Change can be mandated, and has to be,” said Ms. Wittenberg-Cox of 20-First. “But the C.E.O. has to get in and push for it for years. Sometimes, it’s a push that extends across several C.E.O.’s.”